


grapes on the autumn table

by sternerstuff



Category: The Traitor Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Genre: Alternate Universe - Farm/Ranch, Background M/M, Drinking to Cope, F/F, Misses Clause Challenge, canon flirtation, dubious references to grape cultivation and harvesting, found dukes, growing up under empire is no fun!, references to budgets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 13:53:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17044952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sternerstuff/pseuds/sternerstuff
Summary: “Hello yourself,imuira.”(Or, Aurdwynn's Imperial Accountant escapes the city for the country)





	grapes on the autumn table

**Author's Note:**

  * For [electrumqueen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/electrumqueen/gifts).



In the rattling carriage, Baru Cormorant’s pen skids, spills ink across the third draft of her policy proposal. Her sigh rivals that of the most disappointed grandfather. If this is any indication of how the next week will be, her strategic ‘vacation’ might actually become one. Baru twitches a curtain open, eyes the dim cathedral of trees outside. The ochre-red bark wraps trunks broader than Treatymont's streets, and more lovely, but under the clattering of wheels the towering heights emanate a smothering cathedral quiet. As alien as the bustle of the city had once been. So: no, she says to the Muire Lo in her head, I do not expect this last leg of my tour to be _comfortable._ But, then again, getting a budget proposal past Cattlson’s desk intact was never going to be. Hence the tour at all. Hence this glowering forest.

In the center of town (new Falcresti paving, she notes absently), Baru meets with a a familiarly-anonymous half-mask. After four weeks in north Aurdwynn, she can trade the requisite barbs with the tax collector by rote, exaggeratedly entrust her with a set of missives to go south in a quarter of the time. Within an hour, she’s swapped the private carriage for a sedate older mare and is on her way out of town.

Miles down the road, the sharp-peaked roofs and high windows have given way to the soft shadows of a country lane in autumn. Baru’s never been before, of course, but she’s heard plenty of drunken Aurdwynni swooning about the ‘seasonal colors’ and the ‘grand vistas’. At the first swinging wooden sign  for the vineyard itself, the one for wedding parties and other Aurdwynni indolences, she loosens her grip on the reins. Shakes out her knuckles. She practices no lines as she nudges the mare left, or as they pass over a cattle guard, or as she swings herself—belly scraping awkwardly over the saddle before her dangling feet reach the ground—off to heave open the wooden gate.

She looks up from the latch, looking for a mounting block, and instead findsk the riotous growth lining the drive. Baru restrains her small gasp of delight and walks towards it, mare _whuff-_ ing gently behind her. She’s the same height as the tall sunflower stalks, drooping and gone to seed, hanging heads obscured by royal red amaranth and cheerful goldenrod. Her boots are fairly swallowed as she steps into the leggy pink chrysanthemum and purple asters and—Baru leans down to the leathery green leaves, delicately lifts a runner _—impossibly_ small strawberries, at the end of their season. Once she spots them, they’re everywhere, elfin jewels tucked into the greenery, ripe for the taking. She hasn’t seen flowers like this—well, not since Salm had reluctantly torn up the last of the his garden, replaced it with taro and rice for the new market. They’re nice, Baru thinks with the familiar edge of anger, aren’t they? Flowers are _nice._

Inquisitive nickering behind her distracts her from cash crops. As a thank-you, Baru offers her handful of berries to the horse, giggling at the ticklish scrape of teeth and tongue across her hand before she walks down the drive. It’s two hundred yards or so, and her mouth still tastes like sweetsour strawberries when she stops before the simple wooden sign, hands on her hips. _Vultjag Vineyards._

 

* * *

 

She scolds herself as she ties the mare to the hitching post. You are the _Imperial Accountant,_ you deal with powerful people _all the time,_ you will _not_ be scared of seeing an old friend, hardly even a friend really, just a convenient stop on the road, no matter—

“Hello, Fisher.”

Baru’s collarbones jump; her mouth does something complicated. She masters herself, barely rolls her eyes as she turns to scan the lanky figure.. “Hello, duchess—” Baru’s assessment has gotten to her boots, “—what the hell are you wearing? I never thought I’d see you in anything besides leather, not these—”

(But they haven’t seen each other in a while, maybe it isn’t done to reacquaint one's self by mocking another’s brightly-hued—) And then Tain Hu is wrapping Baru up in her arms, and Baru is breathless as she’s lifted off the ground, feels Tain Hu’s cheek pressing hers. _Oh,_ she thinks, it isn’t different after all, and she grins, and wraps her arms around Tain Hu’s broad shoulders.

Tain Hu presses a kiss to her cheek before she sets Baru down. Baru looks up at her with an unbidden helpless half-smile. “Boots with what, Cormorant? You have something to say?”

“They’re very—” Baru is unsure with this kind of play, never sure whether she’s being mocked or not. The fine web of smile lines deepen in Tain Hu's tawny skin when she rests her hands on Baru’s shoulder, ludicrous sun hat tilted up. Her eyes are very dark.

“It’s a regional artform, actually. Not only that, they’re a gift from my uncle,” Tain Hu says, lifting one of the offending objects for inspection, “hence, the garish daffodil-yellow chickens. Leave that ancient mare here, she won't go anywhere that isn’t a feedbag. Come in.”

Baru feels her stomach yawing like a crow’s nest at Tain Hu’s fierce grin, her stride down the garden path. No, not comforting at all.

           

Inside the door, Baru nestles her heels amongst the collection of boots and hats and overalls, the tangles of stray shears and gloves and twine. She rolls her black socks together, tucks them inside. Tain Hu is leaning to stoke the fire, kettle already on the stove, and waves Baru in the direction of the stairs. Baru makes her way up the – one- two – three – seven – teen – steps, down the hallway. The first door: desk littered with a neat ledger, scraps of calculations. Half-empty cup of coffee, wisps of steam gentle in the sunlight. Chipped mug. Stack of books, Aphalone titles. Baru’s fingers itch. She closes the door. The next one opens to a clean-burning oil lamp, the same kind Baru uses at ho—in Treatymont,  and a simple double bed. The third holds an Aurdwynni-style sink and shower. The fourth must be Tain Hu’s, with that print over the bed, and the Urun books, the scraps of paper sticking out of the top.

She returns to the double bed and the yellow lamp, drops her bag at the door. Her bare toes curl into the knotted rugs, the circles of forest-green and cerulean-blue, and she sinks into the bed. Her fingertips trace the looping curves of stitches on the quilt: she remembers a tavern night where Tain Hu’d explained the northern craft culture, the quilt exchange on winter nights. The quiet of the vineyard, filtered through the glass window, is—Baru breathes deep, inhales the faint chirrup of a swallow, the soothing hum of the Tain Hu rustling in the kitchen below—the quiet is lovely, here.

 

* * *

 

“I don’t mean to be blunt, but—”

“You’re always blunt,” Baru says, and reaches for another olive across the dinner table.

“Fair. So: what are you _doing_ here?”

“I am here to help you in your autumn harvest. With picking grapes, I believe, before the frost comes. As discussed. Should I pull out my notes?”

Tain Hu’s brief laugh does nothing to unknit her curious eyebrows. “I’m sure they’re very thorough. No. Why now? It’s been years.”

Baru flares hot; tamps it down. “I was coming up for a survey of the country. Helps to see how the common folk live. You’ve been a valuable business partner in the past.”

“I’m not an idiot, Baru. Is it Aminata or the budget debate? I _do_ get news up here, every so often.”

“It’s—” Baru starts, thinking can’t I just get a _break_ for one damn night, “the budget, your frost is well-timed to buffer my negotiations. Aminata is long gone, which you’d know if _you_ had bothered to keep in touch rather than managing through lackeys and I don’t—”

“Easy, Fisher—”

“—know why you think Aminata would have anything to do with it _anyway_.”

Baru hates that raised eyebrow. “Sure.”

“She doesn’t. Do you want me to go?”

Tain Hu holds her hands up in surrender, laughs. “No, I’m glad to have you. Show you how the, uh, the _common folk_ live.”

 

* * *

 

Tain Hu gathers them all up in the morning, her motley local crew. (“It’s a barter economy. Less taxes that way,” she’d said, over coffee). She gestures Baru towards a charming Maia man, clean-cut and as it turns out, more talkative than a river. They haven’t been out in the vines five minutes before Lyxaxu starts digging into his theories of governance, which is—but that’s you underestimating him, isn’t it?, Baru thinks—it’s surprising but it shouldn’t be, how easily he engages her in conversation. He quizzes her about the loans she issued from the bank in Treatymont, and the Falcresti fiat money, and moral obligations of rule.  He’s a political theorist turned stonemason, and summons arguments any economist could be proud of. They fall in rhythm with each other – extract a few bunches of grapes, muse on the importance of third places to a society. Reach the end of the row, deliver a treatise on the dynamics of dispersed governance. He asks why she calls Tain Hu Duchess, and she barely even hesitates to explain how _regal_ she seemed ("Although I don't believe in hereditary power on principle," she adds), striding around Treatymont. It was amazing how much power one accumulated, with a hand on the mercantile flow of Aurdwynn’s wine.

So on and so forth: Lyxaxu is good company and Baru is delighted to test her mettle against him, even if he does tend to go on a bit. They stop for lunch, all of them: curry and salted elk meat and wine and bread, and hiding from the sun in a cedar grove. Tain Hu takes a critical look at Baru and presses a thumb into her bare arm, shaking her head in silent disappointment when she leaves a bloodless ashen print on Baru’s mahogany skin. She hands over her sun hat.  Baru takes it ruefully, scrubbing a hand through her short-cropped hair before settling the straw down over her ears. She never burned as a child, but it’s been years.

By the end of the day, the field half-picked, even Lyxaxu has run out of steam for politics. There’s the last hauling of all the grapes to Xate Olake’s mechanical crusher, and then the walk back through the redwoods to the main house, and a companionable dinner (stuffed pheasants, hot butter, a plate of Ihuake’s last crop of tomatoes, red sunlight just visible on the tips of the Wintercrests) before Baru retires to her reading upstairs.

Baru is almost disconcerted by how little attention Lyxaxu pays to her over dinner. Instead of re-doubling his philosophy debate with _her,_ he’s across the room in a heated argument with the bearded man next to him. Their faces look like unvarnished pleasure: in Treatymont, she’d say it looked like a business deal going sour, and fast, but she can’t help Treatymont in her thoughts, can she? Anyone who’d spent so much time in a Falcresti school would think _unhygienic_ about men that close. But it’s second thoughts that matter, the logical ones (that’s Falcresti logic too, isn't it?). And logically, of course, she knows there’s nothing wrong.

 

* * *

 

On the second day, the movements feel familiar, rhythmic, and while she misses Lyxaxu’s constant stream of chatter, Unexekome’s quiet company is a different kind of pleasant. She’s looking up at the circling hawks when he says it the first time. Baru freezes with her bucket. She stops her count (two, and one in the distance) and swallows hard, and then carefully resumes the work. Made of gears, she tells herself.

“…Taranoke in the calm season.” Unexekome is saying, the Uronoki gentle in the midst of the Aphalone. “Have you been back?”

“I haven’t. I’ve been—” Baru clears her throat. “Busy. You—you have?”

He grins at her, lightning-fast. “In my merchant days. Not for years and years.”

Baru is quiet as she cuts a stem of grapes, thinking _Taranoke_ and _Sousward._ Thinking _years and years._ “Was there a—” no, not that answer, so: “How did you find it, then?”

Unexekome is thoughtful for long moments. _Snip_ go his scissors on the vines.

“I found it beautiful,” he says, “and dangerous, and in the act of change. I do not think—I think the Taranoki—” (Baru’s clenching blood-red heart) “—are stronger than Falcrest knows.”

He doesn’t tell her much, in the end: square holes in the rock and the chunks of tufa loaded onto his ship. Eyes glancing away in the streets, slipping into alleyways. The uneasy way Falcresti marines held their pikes in the street and moved in groups. Everytime he says Taranoke, he is so kind she thinks she might be dissolving.

“Tell me a story,” he asks, at the end of his. And because she likes stories too, and because she is untethered by the gaping holes in her knowledge of her home, she does. She tells him a story of a young girl who believed that behind the school and the plague and the Aphalone in the Iriad market, she would find _meaning_ and _power_ and _intention._ She believed in some sort of cabal that guided it all, a way that if she were clever enough, and good enough, she could steer the world from behind the curtain. Take back Taranoke in one fell swoop. Instead (Baru inhales, anger at the _illogic_ of it coming back), the data suggests _Sousward_ is held by _deeply_ incompetent squabbling bureaucrats.

Unexekome radiates palpable sympathy for a heroic ideal found wanting. Baru ruminates silently, scornfully, on what she doesn’t say: that it _worked,_ how the lies they told her still feel true.

 

At the end of the day, still sunk into her past, she goes looking for Lyxaxu: something to push back against, someone who will let her argue Baru Cormorant back into being. Someone to debate philosophy, not pain. She turns at the corner of the house and finds him and the short one, the bearded one. She flattens herself against the wall. Slowly sidles around, peering to see if—are they?—they _are,_ silent.

Lyxaxu pressing Oathsfire _(that’s_ his name) against the wall, Lyxaxu with his forearm across the other’s shoulders and Lyxaxu’s dark head at Oathsfire’s neck. Open-mouthed limp boned against the wall Oathsfire leans. Baru’s heart thuds against her sternum ( ~~ _impure_~~ _missing fathers)_ : along the wall Oathsfire’s copper-dark hand grips the back of Lyxaxu’s curly hair, and his other hand spreads wide on the stone of the wall for support, fingers gripping for support, and his denim-covered knee is the only thing other thing visible between—and she talked to Lyxaxu _just this morning_ —and.

Baru takes off her boots neatly by the door, and she leaves the sun hat on the table, and she heads to her room. One—two— seven—teen steps. She will just—have never gone looking for Lyxaxu.

 

* * *

 

Tain Hu finds her later. She takes one look at Baru, scrawling unseeingly into paper, and retrieves a bottle from last year and two mismatched glasses. Now, Baru wiggles her toes at the fire, leaning against the couch; luxuriates in the heat and the stretch in her calves and the warmth in her belly. She hiccups, once. The cedar smoke tastes soft and bright and green.

“Little bird,” Tain Hu says, from the cushion next to her, and then whistles softly—the sweet chirping of the wintercrest wren. Out of season, of course, but Baru smiles, whistles back: she’d learned it from Tain Hu yesterday.  “How goes your wine?”

Baru lifts her glass from the table, peers at it in her best mimicry of an appraiser looking a pearl.  “It appears, Duchess— _hic —_ Duchess of County Vultjag, to be sufficiently full.” She takes a sip, feeling uncommonly buoyant. “It’s _warm_! It’s too close to the fire. I’ll need a new one.”

“If the wine is warm you couldput ice in it, no matter how uncouth. I won’t tell.” Tain Hu says, slow smile in her voice.

Baru hiccups again, sits herself up cross legged. Tain Hu is very close, just there. Isn’t she. She’s probably warm too. But warm like—

“Duchess,” Baru begins. The wine is a blissful slowing of everything. She puts her glass down, and turns an exaggerated accountant’s attention to Tain Hu. Cattlson usually starts squirming within a minute or two.  “Duchess. ”

“Fisher.”

“Duchess. I wondered if you might—Lyxaxu, and. Oathsfire. They seem close, no?” Baru pauses. The merest intimation of wrongdoing. Foolproof city tactic, but Tain Hu and her fox-clever smile give nothing away.

So Baru asks again, and she doesn’t mean to be so serious, but in the way of wine her words have more weight than she means them to,  and the way Oathsfire’s head tipped— “Will you tell me, Hu?”

Tain Hu inhales at her name: it would have been easy to miss. Baru watches her chest rise and fall, watches her make some kind of decision, watches her lean forward and top up both their glasses. For all that, Baru still can’t quite tell her expression.  

“Don’t you know our history?” Tain Hu pauses. “You must. Men used to _marry_ men. And women took wives.  It was done by the—poor, the starving, the desperate, if you needed a business pact or a shared roof. Mostly it was done by those without needs or troubles— for love.”

Baru watches her, wary behind the screen of alcohol. “But all this was long ago. History, as you said. Before Falcrest.”

Tain Hu looks soft, quiet. Eyes full of firelight. “Baru, you _know_ this.  Don’t you? The words _tribadist_ and _sodomite,_ those things they mean and define? They came,” she waves a hand in the air, “later. Before those words there were only...people. Just people.”

She takes a long sip, swallows slowly. Baru watches the contemplation slip away into— “And you think it was before Falcrest? Well.”—the curve of her mouth. “Ask around among the divers at the Horn Harbor. Or the actresses at Atu Hall. They will tell you how long ago it was. I am not quickly forgotten.”

Curiosity like a punch just below Baru’s stomach, a hot curl of _which actress which diver when how many when did you where were._ She covers it with laughing, says, “You _didn’t._ In Treatymont? Under their noses?”

Tain Hu’s eyes round in mock hurt. “You think I’d stop my work at the city gates? Please. I have Vultjag’s tradition of conquest to uphold.”

“There are _more?"_

“Oh, yes. It could take some tallying.” Tain Hu makes confused number shapes with her fingers. “Might even require an accountant.”

Baru almost chokes on her wine.

Tain Hu’s lips a recurve bow, eyes chips of obsidian.. _Unclean,_ whispers Baru’s mind, and _Taranoke_ echoes back. Tain Hu an unsheathed sword, her sudden leaned-in razor-sharp edge voice saying, “In fact, perhaps we should find one right now. Start the audit.”

“Hu—” Baru says, and Tain Hu’s eyes widen impossibly, and then Baru says nothing.  Tain Hu’s open-lips are warmer than blood and tastes like acid, like oak. It sends Baru’s mind blank and buzzing. Like she’s loose in her body, a boneless creature of breath, tethered by the palm on her vertebra. She is in sudden pieces, sweating and shivering all at once: Tain Hu’s low whine and her _teeth_ on Baru’s ear is and it’s all _too much too muchtoomuch,_ and Baru gasps when Tain Hu puts a hand on her heaving chest. When Tain Hu stops and looks at her with a tiny frown between her eyes. Baru’d never—not like—she hadn’t _known_ —

“Baru. Hey. I thought—breathe. Are you—”

“I need—” Baru closes her eyes, picks up the gears. Reconstruction from: iron. Her cold-dark-useful lodging in Treatymont. Long days and lonely bars. Actresses with Tain Hu’s eyes. Machine-cold: “I’m not an actress.”

Tain Hu’s eyes.  Baru-the-accountant: “Please don’t make that assumption again.” There. Good, she thinks. Spit out the grit. “Thank you for the wine. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

When the alcohol fades, her bed is cold.

 

* * *

 

“Baru, look. Come out with me.”

Tain Hu in the doorway looks unfamiliar, almost pleading. Baru tenses, steady-still. Acid-hot memories shoved deep. She looks back down at her notebook of calculations—the Treatymont budget proposal, due when she’s back. She’s triple-checked every number, hours ago. “I’m fine.”

“Don’t—If it’s about last night, I am sor—”

“No,” Baru cuts in, knuckles white on her pencil. She wishes Tain Hu was a ledger, a row of numbers to close the cover on. “I’m not—it’s not important. Last night isn’t—I just had to get work done.”

Tain Hu raises an eyebrow. Baru wishes it didn’t soften her face. “Come on, then, you’ve done enough. The Baru _I_  knew was never this slow.”

Baru narrows her eyes. She doesn’t _have_ to rise to the bait.

“The alpenglow waits for no woman. While Cattlson—I’m sure that’s most of his days.”

And it’s true that she’s developed an appreciation for the mountains and valleys of the Vultsniada, and that Treatymont will suck her back soon enough, and there’s no logical reason to say no. “Fine. We’ll go.”

 

The forest path is a steady silent climb, beneath dark boughs and the impossible towering heights of the redwoods. Baru considers the effect of dappled sunlight on a cat; Tain Hu says nothing. She brings them to a scraped-raw hill top, jutting out from the forest. The Vultsniada runs on the horizon, glinting in the shadows; north, the Wintercrests glow fiery-purple-red in the setting sun. Behind Mt. Kijune to the east, the stars are already glimmering against blue-dark.

Tain Hu says nothing, next to Baru on the stone.

The sun goes down for a  long time. Baru thinks about asking Tain Hu about Devena’s constellations, about Wydd. But instead: “They’re less different here than I’d thought they’d be.” Baru says. Blood humming. Wonders _how raw is this wound? can I stand it?_ “It’s...jarring.”

Tain Hu says nothing, only she sounds like her nothing-ness is listening. Baru summons her courage. Thinks about the cabal-that-isn’t, the bureacracy-that-is, the impossibility of forgetting Tain Hu. “Do you know how we name the sky in the south?”

“No.” Tain Hu’s voice in a puff of frost. It’s the first word Baru has heard from her in hours. “Tell me.”

Baru sits there, arms wrapped around her knees, burrowed into her jacket. Haltingly tries to tell Tain Hu about the warm stars of Taranoke. _Taranoke._ She explains, gesturing at the sky, how the bright burning spill of stars is brighter there than here, and how the patches of darkness punched into the light, the space between the stars, how Salm filled them with stories. How in the calm clear dry season, the Dark River comes up late in the night (and she cannot help but think of Taranoke harbor in that same season, filled with red sails). Baru talks and talks and builds her home in her mind: how she’d sit tucked between Salm and Pinion and Solit and the ceaseless gentle waves until the Huntsman rose in the sky (her voice fades while she searches in vain for his shield above her). How the volcano rumbled, leaked black smoke into the sky and new land into the sea.

How on calm days in that same season, you can get an uncle to take you out in his canoe. You go out past the waving kelp forest and the basalt harbor arms, out to where the water bubbles hot from under the sea, staining the rocks in fierce streaks of green and red. Out where, if you are clever enough and strong enough, you can take a deep breath, and eel to the bottom through—(she searches through Aphalone for the word)—through the color of the sea in a calm. How you collect the delicate sea snails that only grow there, from the place where warm water meets cold and the sand turns bright sulphurous yellow, and you march them home, chest puffed proud. How your fathers smile and Solit says “Oh, my little bird, you know how I love these,” and he runs his knuckles through your soft child’s hair, still wet from the sea (and here she runs out of words, not even Uronoki can capture how it was).

When the words have stopped, and Baru looks back at the _unfamiliar new false_ sky, she calculates a 20° change, an hour of living in Taranoke again, or Taranoke living in her. She twists her head to see Tain Hu, still there, stretched on her back. Tain Hu, who is gazing back at Baru: Baru knows that even in the dark her gaze will be clear and sure and unflinching. Baru looks at her and thinks _I want you to know,_ and _I don’t know if—,_ and abruptly she can’t look anymore, not at something that seems so desperately solid, grounded, at home.

Baru’s eyes settle on the dark fanged bulk of Mt. Kijune, blotting out the stars on the horizon. She doesn’t imagine the Huntsman, doesn’t trick herself into feeling at home, except—Tain Hu reaches over and wraps her fingers around Baru’s wrist, strokes a thumb over Baru’s pulse. That’s all. Gentle. But Tain Hu’s hand is bare in the cold night, and Baru is stifling a gasp, afraid she’ll—pushing down another sob, feeling her eyelashes tremble—afraid she’ll _what,_ that crying will somehow make her more vulnerable?

More vulnerable, thinks Baru bitterly, trying to say it clearly to herself, more than she is already to the warm strength by her side?  More than—she turns her head again, to Tain Hu, clear eyes steady in the twilight. She makes Baru breathless, giddy. Like she did the day before, in the sun, and the years before, in the city. But here, alone, with Lyxaxu and Oathsfire and Unexokome saying _Taranoke_ and—Baru turns her hand. Brings Tain Hu’s warm palm against hers, wraps their fingers together.

Tain Hu might be trembling as she sits up, comes close. Baru shivers in the wind. Tain Hu leans her head to Baru’s ear. Says in dry dear murmur: _“I had dared to hope.”_  

Baru is transparent, glass-calm. Helplessly split-open motionless eyes-closed. Warm breath on her ear.

 _“Imuira,”_ Tain Hu whispers, the Urun word a whisper under the rising wind. _“Kuye lam.”_

Baru knows those words from Uronoki: Salm and Solit and Pinion, on the beach, and she’ll, she’ll give in to logic this time—she turns, comes face-to-face. Swallows hard. Reaching out: she touches Hu’s shoulder, her high cheekbones, strokes a thumb over her aristocratic nose. Reaching out: she fights off fear, repression, endless self-control. Her skin feels burned raw when she shivers in a gust of wind.

Tain Hu’s are wide and close and utterly aware. She has been chewing anise and smyrnium. Baru can smell it, clean, sharp.

“You said that I don’t have to deny who I am.”

“ _Imuira.”_ So soft. “You don’t.”

“Forgive me, then,” Baru says, “I’ve never done this before.”

“Such an ascetic.” Tain Hu chuckles warmly, heartbreakingly gentle,, and in that warmth Baru hears the life she had never thought to reach, to know again. “Fear not. I am practiced.”

“So many conquests,” Baru says, tries to tease. Tain Hu doesn’t let her finish the sentence.

 

* * *

 

Warmth.

She lets it wrap her.

Warmth around her. The walls of books, Urun shapes almost-familiar. The quilt. The portrait of Tain Hu’s never-named parents.

Stop, she thinks. Sleep. Don’t think.

Warmth in the circle of her arms. Pressing beneath her chin. Warmth in her heart.

 

“Mm,” Tain Hu says. “Hello. Your _excellence.”_ The contented slits of her eyes close again. The weight of her body has made Baru’s left arm numb. She turns a little, so that they fit together more perfectly, and presses her nose and lips into the join of Baru’s neck and jaw. She exhales, a long sigh of delight.

“Hello yourself, _imuira.”_  For one more moment: bliss.

Then: Baru Fisher sets her chin on the smooth cap of her lover’s head and _thinks._ The accountant waking inside the woman, like always. The gears ratcheting, locking into place, _plans_ and _risk_ and _catast_ —

 _“Fisher.”_ Tain Hu turns her face up. Baru’s stomach twists at her honey-sleep voice, her pillow-creased cheek. “What are you worrying about?”

“What happens next, I—”

“Stop.”

“No, we—”

“Stop. For now. We’ll figure it out.

Baru laughs, bitter. “Stop interrupting me. How?”

“Fine, but—we’ll do it. The _two_ of us. Brains and brawn. In the meantime, Baru?”

“Yes?”

Tain Hu gleams. “In this bed, _I_  know what happens next. Come here.”

 

* * *

 

As it turns out, Tain Hu not only purrs like a cat under the right conditions, but sleeps like one too. Baru slips out in the late morning, padding quietly downstairs to the stove. She boils water; watches the coffee bloom in the brass pot. Turns over  “the two of us” in her mind like an ocean-smooth stone. The accounts are adding up differently then before, somehow, even though there’s no new information, is there. She’s always _wanted_ this, it just feels…different, when you get it. Bigger. Hotter. Baru feels itchy, hot, craving the unknown: the inner sky that opened up inside Tain Hu, constellations barely hinted at. Unmapped. There was so much _more,_ a hunger growling stronger when fed—her heart drops. Jerked out of thought by the  basket of cheeses, on the table, right in front of her. Her fingers barely tremble as she unfolds the note.

_Came by to discuss future community efforts._  
_Thought I ought not to disturb_  
_the acrobatics. Find me later.   -Pinjagata_

Baru flushes: the fear, and the repression, and the vulnerability blazing up inside but—she quells the instinct, a little. Imagines, instead, that someone who cares for Tain Hu might instead sound like Salm. “Keep your eyes on your feet sometimes, little one.” And Salm wouldn’t—Salm would recognize her, now, in this new-old skin. Wouldn’t be afraid of this Baru. Pinion would clasp Tain Hu’s hands and—wait.

She stops. Looks at the note again. Splits a grape from the table with her teeth, spits out the seeds. Meditates on “future community efforts”. Why did Tain Hu come back _here_ after she stepped down from trade in Treatymont?  What kind of efforts does a community formed entirely of people who—love each other, _the two of us,_ in a system that doesn’t want them to—without a cabal, then how…? What made Taranoke tick? Future community efforts. Perhaps they can use the aid of an Imperial Accountant. She hints as much to Tain Hu before she starts her return journey south.

She doesn’t mind that she can’t write her new policy plans down as she jolts southward the next day. Plans like this aren't made to be exposed in ink.

**Author's Note:**

> electrumqueen, thank you SO MUCH for the opportunity to _wreck_ myself by drawing on all of the lovely moments in canon, and by trying to imagine a...slightly-less tortured Baru? (Also, for my arrival on the good dinghy Oathsfire/Lyxaxu, long may it sail). Happy Yuletide!
> 
> Many thanks to the members of my implacable-machineries-of-empire thread, who listened to me rant about the cuisine of Aurdwynn ("They eat curry?! But are in the _redwoods_? What IS this climate?!!") for multiple months, and to [karanguni](https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/profile) for immensely helpful beta notes. 
> 
> Title from T.S. Eliot's _The Dry Salvages_.
> 
> come say hello on [dreamwidth](https://felinejumper.dreamwidth.org/)


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